Recent reviews by soldyne

Evil Genius 2 is an excellent sequel to the original. It has the same quirky humor, diabolical traps, movie quality music and has improved on some of the flaws from the original. some of the improvements include automatic tagging of intruders, guard posts to ensure minions are stationed where they are needed, research trees to control the direction of your progress and the ability to easily undo or re-design your lair as you see fit. There are a very few bugs to speak of and those that I have found are not game breaking.

In its early state, there are still some balance issues which should be expected. the forces of justice are bit too good at combat and detect traps a bit too frequently. some achievements may actually be un-achievable, but, the developers have made note of it and are working on a fix. One major complaint is that the UI is a bit clunky and the tool tips don't really help explain the game mechanics. however, none of things are enough to call the game "bad". they all have workarounds or can be easily patched and tweaked.

If you are fan of EG1 or just want to dive into a good old fashioned lair builder then this is a good pick.

MachiVillain is a simple resource management sim that has you take on the role of evil overlord and manage a monster filled cabin in the woods. The basic concept of the game is to design and build a house of horrors in a remote woodland area where you can attract hapless victims to kill and feed your minions. This is all done with the goal to rise through the ranks of an secret cult of evil overlords. As you progress you will find your maniac mansion being beset by random groups of heroes and other overlords who are jealous of your obvious superiority.

It has no lack of dark humor and horror movie references and even uses horror movie tropes as central game mechanics. The art and animation style are cartoony and humorous but actually work well to convey the campy theme that the developer had in mind. The game has a few minor bugs, but nothing to break the game. The biggest flaw is that there is not enough content. you will find yourself building Barbie's Dream House of Horrors and then realize that there is nothing left to do and you will ache for more.

Its a good game for something to bridge the gap between larger/longer/more serious games and I certainly hope to see a MachiaVillain 2 in the future.

A simple rogue-like with a simple premise - Go Right!
The game is heavily dependent on random generation, but, the game can be forgiving at times. the rate of bad runs vs good runs is about 50/50. if you have a bad game, just start over and try again. There are many different classes of characters with different advantages and disadvantages. There is a vault system that allows you to save some rare items between adventures and a perk system to customize your character for different goals. there are tons of different endings and a rather compelling story which only truly unfolds as you unlock the different epilogues.

Each game can be completed in anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours depending on the goal you are trying to achieve. 100% achievements can be acquired within 40hrs or so (with the DLC which is highly recommended).

After 67 hours and 100% completion I can honestly give this game a solid "Meh". The best way to describe this game is a Resource Management RPG where crafting is the focus of progression. As with any crafting game you will spend a lot of time grinding for ingredients. The story progression is locked behind crafting walls where you can't progress past until you give the person a specific item. That item requires a technology to be unlocked and then a set of workstations to be built which requires materials that also need to be crafted which themselves require other technologies...its enough to make you dizzy.

I gave this game a positve recommendation because eventhough the intricate requirements of technologies and crafting can at times be frustrating, I found that I was forcing myself to step back, pick a goal, research the path to get there and then concentrating on accomplishing the task, which is what makes a game a game. For example, I set out to build a Marble Columbarium for my graveyard and it reuquired quite a few techs and a lot of rare ingredients. when it was done, I felt accomplished and it wasn't even needed for story progression.

PROS:
Unique Graveyard theme (just in time for Holloween)
Charming 2D graphics
Interesting story (once you get past all the crafting walls)
Decent sized tech trees that give a sense of progression
Lots of areas to explore and discover
Fast Travel, speed potions and short cut options to reduce time spent traveling

CONS:
Not enough turtorials; you will need the Wiki and user guides to get through the game
Some bugs remain and there are some leftover assets that do nothing, but, nothing game breaking.
Fishing as an activity was pointless (except for unblocking two quest lines).
No way to move time forward reliably. if you need to wait for an NPC and he doesn't show up for a week, then plan on waiting for an hour of real time for the game time to tick by.
No Replayability. The game doesn't have any lasting charm. After a single playthrough I will probably not play it again.

First, it should be noted that the day/night cycle was added to the base game as an update/patch for free. this expansion pack adds new buildings and game play to take advantage of the new night life.

For serious fans this expansion pack is a must have. it adds many new buildings to the game as well as new commercial specializations for leisure and tourism. It adds a lot of new transit options such as a larger airport with built in metro station, a combination rail/seaport, taxis and a large bus depot which allows all your bus lines to converge into the ultimate transit hub.

The expansion also adds some more unique buildings like the zoo which are always fun additions to any city.

This is certainly recommended for serious city builders, but, if you are just looking for a day/night cycle then either leave it or wait for a sale.

This is the next great king of city simulators. I spent my first 100 hours of this game making new assets and even taught myself 3-D modeling just so I could have exactly the kinds of props and buildings I wanted in my city. After making about 100 of my own assets, it then downloaded 400 more. I was like a kid in a candy store! I then proceeded to play the game for the first time after 100 hours of testing and planning and spent another 100 hours building my dream city on my own custom map with my own custom assets.

any game that allows you to spend just as much time out of game planning, preparing, learning and growing as you do in the game experimenting, testing, failing and succeeding is a great game indeed.

Pros:
- Curved Roads: The game allows for curved, free-form placed roads and grid snapping. There are also tunnels and free-form bridges which make for many 3-d options for your cities transportation needs.
- Transit: Transportation has many forms; there are of course roads of various sizes (2, 4 and 6 lanes with 2way and 1 way options), highways with on-off ramps, rail for both passengers and freight, subway/metro, air travel and sea travel. You can even set up your own bus lines and design your own mass transit hub.
- Districts: you can designate districts in your city to not only give different areas names but also to assign specific policies. have no-smoking in one part of the city and set 'mary-jane' to recreational use in another!
- Individually simulated people: the "cims" of the game are individually simulated and tracked. they have lives they live out in your city, being born, going to school, get a job, going to the park, going shopping, retiring and eventually dying.
- sense of progression: the game has milestones as your city grows which unlocks various services. before the services are unlocked your city generally doesn't need them so you can stay small and not be punished. The game also has in-game achievements in the form of monuments and unique buildings. if your city meets the achievement requirements then a unique building with special abilities will unlock as a reward which gives you plenty of goals to shoot for while you build your dream city.
- Lots of space: - the base game starts with a single 2km x 2km square to start you city. it then gives you the opportunity to expand this to other squares in a 5x5 tile map. in the base game you can only buy up to 9 of these 25 tiles, but, you can buy them in any contiguous configuration. with mods, you buy all 25 tiles which will be more than enough room for any city.
- Water physics: the water on the map actually flows and can affect things like where water pollution ends up and where you can build a hydroelectric dam. if you build the dam in a bad place or destroy a working dam it can flood your city which would be a disaster of your own making (and who doesn't like making disasters?)
- MODs, MODs, MODs! if you don't like the look of a park, you can change it. if you need a building of certain size to fit in a tight spot, then make it. if you want your house to appear in the game, you can do that too (with some 3d Modeling skills). If you don't like the way the game works, there is probably already a mod to change it.
- Active Dev support: the developers are active on the official forums and respond regularly to many threads. they also put out regular updates and have indeed fixed many of the bugs that were initially in the game.

Cons:
- Unrealistic Industry: Lot sizes are limited to 4x4 on organically grown lots which is fine for most residential and commercial lots, but, realistic industrial lots are much larger than this. While this game does not do industry realistically, no game does, so its just par for the course.
- No Parking: Another thing this game does not give justice to is parking. As an American living in a suburban city I see shopping plazas with acres of parking lots at every major intersection. in this game, all commercial lots must be placed right along the road side which is good for small town out-lots or big city high rises. realistic suburban shopping centers require extra planning and the creation(or download) of custom assets and even then decent, realistic shopping centers are difficult to build at best. but, like with industrial sectors, no city simulator has ever done parking right, so again, its on par with others of its kind
- Death Spikes: as mentioned in the Pros above, your cims will die at some point. currently, all cims live the same length of time and if you build quickly then you will eventually have a spike in the amount of deaths your city will experience which can lead to lots of empty houses, and industry and commercial lots with no workers. Plus the game has a new service which will dispose of the dead in cemeteries or crematoriums. a death spike will overload this service and you could end up with a lot of abandoned buildings if you don't plan for it.
- Water physics: wait, wasn't this a pro? the water may have its own physics but they aren't exactly realistic. water can seem to flow in multiple directions on a river or can seem to flow uphill in some spots on certain maps. Hydroelectric dams are extremely difficult to get working and sometimes may not work at all. Once flooding starts it can take years of game time to clean it up which means your city is pretty much soggy toast.
- MODs! again with the pros being cons. since game modification is part of the vanilla game and is rather easy to do, everyone has submitted at least 1 asset to the workshop. this means that the workshop literally has 10's of thousands of custom assets and mods and most of them are simplistic, useless, poor quality or unbalanced. Trying to sift through the mass of mods to find the few that are actually worth getting can be a game all unto itself. When you do find a set of assets for your game it could take several minuets (even with an SSD and 8+GB of RAM) before you can load even a new city. as your city grows the load times get longer and longer. Once the game loads it plays smooth, it just takes patience!
- NVIDIA driver bugs - I use a GTX970 card with recent drivers which comes with a game ready setting specifically for Cities Skylines, however, I get constant crashes when viewing certain overlays like overall happiness, fire coverage, or land value. this is of course handled by constant saving, but, needing to shut down and reload can be a pain.

First impressions are that its a fun little game. Its a cross between Diablo and a JRPG. Diablo in the form of random loot drops with randomly generated stats and crafting, JRPG in the sense of combat and questing. The humor is off-the-wall random to the point that quests details are randomly determined without any sense; Go defeat the 32 mice and recover the 56 bales of hay; find the 15 merchants and dispatch the 82 legions of spoons.

The one mechanical difference between this game and other JRPG types is that you can create up to 12 different adventuring parties and have 3-4 of those parties go on seperate adventures simultaneously while the others rest up or train at the university; thus you manage your adventures (roll credits).

The story is just an excuse plot to make you go kill random things in random dungeons and goes so far as to poke fun at the entire JRPG/fantasy genre.

If the random humor is the up side, then the down side is the micro-management. if you have 12 parties with 4 members each, then you have 48 heroes to level up, choose skills for, assign gear to and send to school (wow, did I just inherit 48 children?). Eventually you will develop a pattern that works for you, but, about 60% of my game time is spent managing my parties and only about 40% is spent grinding the dungeons.

If you want a simple rogue-like/JRPG experience with some satyrical humor give it a go; just don't expect it to be GOTY.

Deceptively addictive. It lures you in with its cute graphics and simple UI until you start to realize the confounding interconnectedness of its resource synergies. I spent just as much time outside of the game planning my strategies as I did in the game realizing I needed new strategies. Trying to wrap your head around how all the resources and ambassadors and power trees work together is like to trying to map out a bowl of spaghetti; its messy, squishy, wibbly, wobbly and damned satisfying once you've figured out how to slurpped it all up.

This is NOT a god/sim game. it IS a math puzzle game dressed up as a god game. it will frustrate you at first, but, eventually you will feel like a god once you think you have it all figured out...and then those danged villigers start another war! GAH! Stop Fighting!

The graphics may be simple and 2D but the depth of the game continuously expands as you play. If you are a fan of Minecraft or of the old school Castlevania platformers then give it a try.